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"He urged me," relates Guillaume, "to imitate himself and 'to make my peace with the bourgeoisie." "It is useless," are Bakounin's words, "to wish obstinately to obtain the impossible. It is necessary to recognize reality and to realize that, for the moment, the popular masses do not wish socialism.
He was a very real product of Russia's infamy, and we need not be surprised if one with Bakounin's great talents, worshiping Satan and preaching ideas of destruction that comprehended Cosmos itself, should have performed in the world a unique and never-to-be-forgotten rôle. It was inevitable that he should have stood out among the men of his time as a strange, bewildering figure.
The results of the previous uprisings had a terribly depressing effect upon nearly all the older men, but there were four youths attached to Bakounin's insurrectionary ideas whose spirits were not bowed down by what had occurred. Carlo Cafiero, Enrico Malatesta, Paul Brousse, and Prince Kropotkin were at the period of life when action was a joyous thing, and they undertook to make history.
He begins then to oppose to political action what he calls economic action. In the fragment not published during Bakounin's life the Protestation de l'Alliance, he covers for the hundredth time his arguments against the Volksstaat, which is a "ridiculous contradiction, a fiction, a lie."
Farewell, justice for the people and the triumph of humanity! All that could have grown out of the present disaster of France. All that would have grown out of it if the people of France, if the people of Lyons, had wished it." The insurrection at Lyons and Bakounin's decree abolishing the State amounted to very little in the history of the French Republic.
Over young middle-class youths, especially, Bakounin's magnetic power was extraordinary, and his followers were the faithful of the faithful. A very striking picture of Bakounin's hypnotic influence over this circle is to be found in the memoirs of Madame A. Bauler. She tells us of some Sundays she spent with Bakounin and his friends.
The inherent weakness of Bakounin's entire philosophy lay in this fact, that it begins with the necessity of abolishing God and the State, and that it can never get beyond that or away from that.
Marx, Engels, and Eccarius, as we know, ridiculed Bakounin's terror of the State; and how many times since have the socialists been compelled to deal with this bugaboo! It rises up in every country from time to time.
France and Spain, having now failed to launch the universal revolution, Bakounin's hopes turned to Italy, where a series of artificial uprisings among the almost famished peasants was being stirred up by his followers. Their greatest activity was during the first two weeks in August of the next year, 1874, and the three main centers were Bologna, Romagna, and Apulia.
But the State, in the form and aspect of two companies of national bourgeois guards, entered by a door which they had forgotten to guard, swept the hall, and caused Bakounin to hasten back along the road to Geneva." Such indeed was the humiliating and vexatious ending of Bakounin's dream of an immediate social revolution. His sole reward was to be jostled, pinched, and robbed.
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